Father's Day
by InsertImaginativeNameHere
Summary: Father's Day in the Westen household never really went down well. In fact, it was a disaster. Every single year. As the one holiday Frank Westen never missed, how could it be anything else?


Father's Day.

The day you had to be grateful for your very existence and illustrate this gratitude with gifts, expressions of affection, and certainly nothing along the lines of sabotaging your father's attempts to fix his horrific car by _borrowing_ some of the important electrical equipment to build an experimental circuit under your bed.

Father's Day.

The day you were supposed to spend close to your dad, wrapped up in his loving arms, rather than running through the house from his considerably-less-loving fists.

Father's Day.

The day you prayed – _prayed –_ your father had pulled one of his vanishing acts and wouldn't turn up. He always tuned up. Some sort of sick irony, Father's Day was the one holiday he never missed. Every year, promptly, he would turn up, and as the years went by it only ever got worse. Maybe it was because Michael didn't know when to keep his mouth shut. His mother told him every time his father returned home _keep your head down, don't argue with him._ And every time Michael Westen couldn't help but push it, snide remarks he should have kept to himself bursting out whenever he saw the man he had to call Dad.

"Don't," his mother warned him, as if she could hear his very thoughts. "Don't you dare. If not for yourself, for Nate. He doesn't know any better, he'll copy you. You know how he looks up to you."

"Nate? Ma, he threw up all over me yesterday. If he looks up to me, he's got a funny way of showing it."

"Promise me, Michael? You'll behave? No trouble?"

As a rule, Michael tried to avoid telling outright lies to his mother. This was a rule he broke on a daily basis, but he reassured himself by pretending he did so reluctantly and not at all because he had a compulsive lying streak as every last one of the neighbours thought. 'Those Westen kids are trouble' he'd overheard one old lady say 'Especially that older one. He's a menace'. No matter how hard Michael had tried, and he used to try, once, his reputation preceded him. His _father's_ reputation preceded him. People looked at him and they heard the arguments late at night, saw the occasional bruise, and they said nothing. He was categorised with his father, guilty by association. A liar; in his defence, it was far better to lie than get caught doing something wrong. A thief; granted, but by necessity only. A 'menace'; well, there was nothing more to say about that. Nothing whatsoever.

And it was Father's Day.

"Michael?"

"I promise, ma," he lied. "I promise I'll behave."

His mother glared at him suspiciously and for a moment he thought he was about to earn himself a lecture that would last for what felt like hours, but no, she took the bait for once, and let him past, escorting him from his room like a prison guard. It was like a prison actually, only prison might be better. The food might even be an improvement. There were rules, in prison. You could decide who visited you. Nate would be allowed of course, whenever possible. Ma, maybe, if she wasn't on one of her neurotic tirades. Andre, naturally. And Dad could stay as far away as possible. After some thought, he decided this was probably a bad idea. For now.

In the living room, Nate was already up, playing with a toy car he'd definitely stolen from his brother. Before Michael could say anything, he remembered his half-promise to his mother. No trouble. Even if Nate was messing about with his things.

Even if it was Father's Day.

There he was, sat in his chair, watching the television intently and ignoring his eldest son. Slowly, he turned his head and smiled, almost predatory in his manner. He was toying with them. Whatever Michael did now, he knew it wouldn't be good enough, it would lead to fights and anger and Nate crying in the corner and broken promises. Moving cautiously towards Nate, Michael sat down and began hesitantly moving another toy car, crashing it into his brother's with an exaggerated explosion.

"Aren't you going to say happy Father's Day, boy?"

"Frank honey, you know-" Ma began, only to be cut off with a sharp look. She smiled and backed away, filling Michael with a rush of anger – she was condoning this, letting it unfold before her eyes. Letting her son, her own son, dig himself a grave he couldn't get out of.

"Well?" He could feel his father's eyes on the back of his head "Look at me when I'm speaking to you."

Impulsively, Michael met his father's gaze. "Happy Father's Day," he said coldly, so cynical for one so young. His father's eyebrows narrowed, knowing damn well his son didn't mean a word of it. For a moment, the atmosphere in the room was chill and tense, and then, Frank Westen seemed to grow bored of psychological manipulation and return to the far more interesting game on the screen. The other three members of the family relaxed, even Nate, who had learnt to tell early when a fight was on its way.

The boys returned to their cars, their mother Madeline to her 'cooking', if that was the word for whatever she was currently engaged.

Father's Day.

 _One down, one too many more left to go._

"Man, why are we even here?" Nate asked his older brother as they stood over the grave of their long-dead father. "You hated him when he was alive. He hated you. You weren't even here for the funeral."

"If you would like to recall, when he died I was engaged on classified work and was out of contact for several months. I didn't know until I got back into the States."

"Yeah, whatever."

Why was it that he knew exactly how to tease information out of a drug dealer, could manipulate warlords into doing whatever he wanted, had been one of the best the CIA had trained, and yet in a simple conversation with his own brother, whatever he said was always the wrong thing?

"Well, I'm here now," Michael Westen said dispassionately. "It is Father's Day after all."

There was a silence, somewhat awkward, as the brothers remembered exactly what this date meant to the pair of them, to their family. Father's Day. After a moment, Nate turned to his former (though this was debated) spy sibling and asked the million dollar question.

"Do you think he ever, you know, regretted how he raised us?"

Michael shrugged. "Regretting something doesn't change what happened."

His younger brother laughed. "You can say that again."

Another silence. There was very little left to say. Except for one last, crucial little thing:

" _Happy Father's Day."_


End file.
